media.technology.policy.

Gillmor writes in his prediction for 2016 that journalists will turn activists in 2016 as “[t]he decentralization of technology and communications that led to the greatest boom in free expression in history is in jeopardy from governments and corporations that are radically recentralizing the digital world, creating choke points and providing unprecedented control to the centralized powers.”

I would echo his call for a more “activist” journalism, as he calls it, though one could argue this is in fact somewhat of a return to older styles of American journalism. “We cannot take for granted that the Surveillance State has won. We cannot let Facebook’s terms of service trump the First Amendment (or, by extension, allow Facebook to control which journalism companies survive). And we can’t just write down and regurgitate presidential candidates’ “We have to censor the Internet, ban encryption, and spy on everyone” statements,” writes Gillmor.

He continues: “On some issues, journalists who claim to be neutral observers are, in fact, enablers. If journalists won’t take a stand for core liberties like free expression — and then be leaders in the campaign to save or restore them — we’ll be fit to call ourselves entertainers, and not much else.”